This quote from Roman Payne’s new novel “The Wanderess” is trending heavily on the web right now with over 30,000 exact-phrase searches in Google. The popularity of the quote is due to the message it conveys to the thousands of people (mostly young women) who are posting it on their blogs and social network profiles. But it all started with the bright invention of a representative of “Kleos Campaigns” (www.kleoscampaigns.com) who fell in love with Payne’s novel. The story of a young woman wandering the world alone, looking for her lost friend and some mysterious “fortune” which is the key to her destiny spoke to her soul. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d read a novel with such beautiful language, and such a spirit for carefree travel and adventure.

She immediately contacted Payne’s publisher, Aesthete Press. Aesthete Press was extremely impressed with Kleos Campaigns’ portfolio and their long, successful history in the marketing business; and so a synergy was established: Aesthete Press hired Kleos Campaigns to help market “The Wanderess.” This one particular quote about the book’s heroine (the “Wanderess”) being a “drop of free water” jumped out at Kleos’ representative in charge of the project. She googled the phrase and found there were only a dozen or so exact-phrase results for that quote (the book, which was released late November, 2013, had only been out for a couple of months at the time). And so she created what her agency calls a “Designer Quote,” which is a very successful technique used by Kleos Campaigns whereas an original saying is combined with an image or pattern to make a graphic that can be shared across all social media platforms, posted on people’s Facebook walls, Instagram pages, Pinterest boards, etc.

Less than a month after Kleos Campaigns began publishing their Designer Quote, featuring Roman Payne’s quotation alongside a picture of a lovely woman who appears both savage and free, yet civilized and elegant, the quotation had already taken off, appearing on over 10,000 blogs and websites worldwide. “Our agency gave Payne’s ‘The Wanderess’ the push it needed,” says Julie Pierce of Kleos Campaigns, “but the viral effect needed help from no one. This spring, it seems that each day Payne’s quote appears on a hundred or more new websites, and this is without advertising!” Well, viral marketing isn’t a new subject to anyone. The interest in this story lies in the quote itself and what its viral tendency says about our world today…

The automobile, social views on society, and events in politics, tempted thousands of young American men to “go on the road” in the 1950s. Young women wouldn’t get that adventurous until the Sexual Revolution a decade later. Kerouac’s book was their Bible, but it didn’t take them out of North America. Today, in 2014, the scene is different: independent airlines fly internationally cheaper than ever; more young people possess passports than ever before; bank cards and cell phones work with ease when out of the country; the European Union has practically dissolved borders in Europe so that travel within Europe now resembles travel within the 50 States of America. All this, and the fact that English is taught to the young in virtually all countries, making one universal language contribute to build one universal democratic state. Today, people of both genders and all ages are travelling more frequently than ever; and permits to work in foreign countries are more issued more freely than ever before. Yes, it appears that an age of international “wandering” is about to begin…

The End of “Travelling” and the beginning of “Wandering”…

The heroes in Kerouac’s “On the Road” didn’t wander, they “travelled.” Their beat-down Beatnik path was hard a lot of the time. The very word “travel” implies a laborious journey. The word “travel,” after all, comes from the French word “travail” (“to toil, to work, to labor…”). In Roman Payne’s “The Wanderess,” the heroes are more carefree, light at heart, and they are more lucky! They don’t “travel,” what they do is “wander” (“wander” comes from the West Germanic “wandran” [“to roam about”]). When one has a laptop or iPad, a cellphone and bank card that work internationally, and plane tickets that can be purchased only hours before the flight right from one’s laptop—or from one’s cellphone if there is no Wi-Fi connection nearby—an international voyage resembles a simple “wandering around” rather than a “laborious effort.” And of all people, who love to wander more than the wanderesses?, i.e.: women?

“I have been a wanderer all my life,” says novelist Roman Payne, “and I’ve seen male friends of mine take pleasure in random voyages. But there is something innate in women that astounds me. Most young women I’ve known have this deep and strong wanderlust that is insatiable. The only thing that stops them from running up and down, over and around again, this big, wide world of ours, to explore every country, every island, every city… is society, or money, or technology.”

But now all that is changing at a rate as fast as the viral spread of his quote on the internet. Young women today “want” to wander the world, and society and technology are no longer a hindrance. And when society and technology both “want” and “can do” something, they work together so that the money flows enough to do it.